At his public readings, Mr. Wallace either skips footnotes, reads them as if they were in the main text or - the "worst option," he said in a telephone interview- brackets them by saying "begin footnote" and "end footnote."A brain voice? Do you have a brain voice? That should be an easy question to answer, but I can't answer it. I think I only have a sense of a "brain voice" when I'm thinking about speaking, which is the opposite of what Wallace is talking about.
"I spend a very long time trying to get the writing to hang together grammatically on the page more than for a sweating, breathing person to read to an audience," Mr. Wallace said from his home in Claremont, Calif., his voice sounding oddly footnote-ish. "Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read it is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically."
So single-minded is Mr. Wallace, who is 43, about how his work looks over how it sounds that at his first public reading in the late 1980's, "I inserted the punctuation," he recalled, adding: "I would read a clause and say 'comma' or 'semicolon.' Or I'd say, 'new paragraph' and 'indent.' Now looking back at it I can see what a silent deal this is for me." At one point in "Consider the Lobster," Mr. Wallace encounters an ellipsis and reads "dot, dot, dot," which producers say is verboten. "Part of it is I'm not an actor and I don't know how to trail off, and I become somewhat autistic about it," he said.
"I become somewhat autistic about it" -- I'm not too sure what that means either! You mean he's not consciously being sort of funny when he says "dot, dot, dot"? He's just bizarrely overfocused on his own text?
Anyway, despite the seeming lack of similarity by between my mind and Wallace's, I'm greatly enjoying "Lobster," which I've got in my iPod.
Speaking of autism, the article also discusses the audio book of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," a novel with an autistic boy as the first-person narrator. I've listened to this one too. This one isn't read by the author -- Mark Haddon -- but by an excellent reader named Jeff Woodman. Here, the book has all sorts of drawings and diagrams, and the text has had to be reconfigured a bit so you can understand it without the graphics. This makes me likely to buy the book too.
I must add that even when the book lacks any distinctive visual elements, the experience of seeing the text is different enough that I find that when I like an audio book, I want to see the text too.
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I don't think Infinite Jest would be half as much fun read aloud, somehow. Apart from the insane number of hours that would entail, I liked having my own method for dealing with the footnotes, and the fact that it was a kind of project to wade through it.
My take on the autism line was that a non-autistic person would be able to handle the punctuation in an expressive way [trailing off] rather than a computer-ish, descriptive [dot dot dot] way. There's a great part in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, (great audiobook fare, btw) where he talks about filming an autistic man's eyes while he watches "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and comparing his focus to that of an average viewer. During a love scene, everyone watches the couple's lips and eyes, while his land on a lightswitch behind them.
David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is perfect for audio because it has him singing ads in his Billy Holliday voice, which just doesn't get any better, for my money.
It's not nearly as good as A Supposedly Fun Thing . . . though I did enjoy his trip to the AVN Awards. Overall, just wasn't as sharp, though everyone should read the unabridged Up Simba at least once.
I used to read for Reading for the Blind, and there, when we encountered footnotes, we just noted them in the text, and returned to them after we finished the paragraph. Of course, mostly I was reading textbooks for high school or introductory college courses, so the footnotes tended to come at the ends of sentences and didn't interfere much with the nonexistant rhetorical flow of the work. It's different, I suppose, for a work with a strong authorial voice in which the footnotes are both essential and intrusive -- Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example.
Adam, I'm not remembering what Up Simba is. When he was traveling with McCain? Where would I find it?
Jen, that's what it is, and it's contained in Consider the Lobster, the title article of which is online for free. Sssh!
Thanks Adam! I'll check it out. (But speaking of footnotes, they get pretty teeny on the pdf. I might have to bite the bullet.)
I liked Curious Incident as well, Janet. I'm also a big Oliver Sacks fan, and all of his essays about autism (and neurology generally) are just fascinating to me. He'd be fun to listen to. I'd also get a kick out of George Saunders reading his stuff.
Does it seem crazy-wrong to anyone else that "This American Life" isn't available as a free podcast?
I use footnotes for two closely related purposes: either to give citations, or to offer discussion which is pertinent, to important to leave out, but which would distract from the flow of the main article. Neither of those goals are served by any of the methods suggested for an audio book, and are in many ways entirely defeated. It's a pickle of a problem, but I would have to suggest that the best way to deal with it would have to be to leave them out entirely.
I'm slogging through Tony Judt's Postwar, at the moment. Within a footnote in the preface, one reads the following:
"To avoid adding to what is already a very long book addressed to a general readership, a full apparatus of references is not provided here. Instead, the sources for Postwar, together with a full bibliography, will in due course be available for consultation on the Remarque Institute website..."
Not sure what I think of this solution, but it could work for audiobooks, I suppose.
I find it fascinating that Ann doesn't understand "brain voice", because my children are at an age when they have just developed/are developing their "inner speech," as some psychologists call it. Before 5 or 6, kids don't have a head voice -- that's why they can't read silently.
My nearly-5-year-old wanted to play a game with me the other day, and I was right in the middle of a rather lengthy article. I told him I would play with him when I finished my reading. After a few minutes, he got very angry with me: I don't hear any reading, Mom!
I had to explain to him that I could read the words and hear them inside my head. He thought that was weird.
Anyways, I'm sure this is what Wallce was talking about. As an aside, when I read different blogs, I hear them in different voices. Perhaps this explains my aversion to listening to podcasts: I don't want to adjust my voice-profiles for Ann, for example, or Lileks.
Joan: I would think that would slow reading down quite a bit. I think the secret to reading quickly is to see whole phrases at once, but speech has to be done one syllable at a time. I'm capable of imagining speech, but if I'm just reading or thinking normally, I don't "hear" individual words. To do that would be to slow down.
They've obviously never heard of Victor Borge's "Verbal Punctuation". :-)
As to 'hearing' words while reading, that's optional, but as to 'hearing' words while writing, that's paramount.
Much bad prose could be tightened if the composer thought of the musicality, rhythm and cadence suggested by the word choice.
I think all writing should take into account (see I originally had consideration, but it was dissonant there) what it sounds like read aloud.
If an author has trouble reciting his/her own words, then the trouble, most likely, lies with the words not the recitation.
The world would be a far better place if tech writers (and I include law writing, medical writing, etc. as tech writing) would keep this rule in mind.
XWL: Even though writers should have an "ear" for what they are writing, I think this comes from engaging with the part of your brain that produces speech. When you speak out loud, you're not also producing an internal voice in your head. I think when writing you have the feeling of producing speech. It ultimately "sounds" right to readers, because it's like speech. The reader, then, is like a listener. And a listener doesn't generate a second voice in his head. He hears sound from the outside. This could all be tested in the laboratory, of course. What parts of the brain are involved in reading, listening, writing, and speaking? If reading is like listening and writing is like speaking, then no "brain voice" ever needs to occur.
How about when you are just thinking? I find this very hard to observe. As soon as I start to try to "hear" if my thoughts have a voice, I'm not thinking in the same way anymore and I may be trying to generate something voicelike. But I certainly don't feel as though I've got someone yammering in my head all the time.
There's a decent chance that this changes with age. When I was younger, I could get a song stuck in my head or a conversation might seem to replay, but this does not happen anymore.
This is similar to the question of whether we see pictures in our heads when we think. Clearly, we can picture things. But thinking or reading, I don't see much of anything, though I may have an idea that is like an image, it's really almost nothing (unless I'm dreaming).
I would think that would slow reading down quite a bit.
That's one reason I do it at least -- helps me make sure I'm not skipping over something important.
The only evidence I have of my own "brain voice" is the recollection that I have of thinking in French and Spanish back in high school when I studied those languages, especially toward the end, when I was a few years into it. I remember a friend telling me she did the same thing. It faded away after school as I lost my facility for speaking French and Spanish when I stopped studying them.
When I'm deep in thought (a very, very rare thing), I often talk to myself in a quiet voice to work out whatever it is I'm thinking about.
I read very fast, but my experience of reading, and writing, is very verbal -- my sense of reading is that I "hear" the words in my head. It doesn't slow me down at all. One reason I can read quickly is because I do recognize entire words, phrases, and patterns -- but I still "hear" those discreet words.
Slac, a quick googling turned up this paper which discusses how children gradually progress from talking to themselves to "inner speech", that is: thinking instead of speaking, and this study which demonstrated that younger children aren't aware of inner speech. My son has watched his brother and sister (2 and 4 years older than him) read silently on numerous occasions, so he is familiar with the process -- he was just frustrated with me that I wasn't playing with him, and he does think it's weird (and also, again, frustrating) that we can do something he can't, and so he voiced his frustration.
I don't understand how anyone can read without some perception of "voice". Obviously my ears aren't involved, and so I'm not "hearing" it, but that's the best way for me to describe it, because it comes closest to how I perceive it. I think Foster's description of the characteristics of "brain voice" is, for me, anyway, quite accurate.
We may just be disagreeing about the scope of the meaning of the word "voice," with me insisting on separating out a usage I think is only metaphorical. Personally, I experience my own mind as amazingly quiet and empty. I'm often surprised that I can ever think of or remember anything. It used to worry me when I walked into a class not to have a feeling that all the things I needed to know are visible on the surface of my mind or playing in a mentally audible tape loop. But now that I think of it, I can remember worrying so much about remembering things I needed to know for law school exams that I would study my outline until I developed a mental picture of the whole thing. I considered myself to have a slow-developing photographic memory. But that's way to much trouble for ordinary life.
four years later... I think "brain voice" is the voice in your head, the pratttling never ending nattering voice of your thoughts. So DFW is striving, to make an analog of that on the page -- using the craft of the "writing on the page" to recreate it... so it's natural to say "dot dot dot" when he's speaking, cuz when he's speaking, he's is trying not to create a third thing, an aural version of the book; but rather an oral reading/recreation of the written word - that is, I'll read this in a way that will create in your head the experience of reading the book on the page, as opposed to hearing it in your ear...
something about DFW make you (me) write/think in the style that he writes/thinks... which is just more of his genius.... when other people do it(like me) it's pretentious and imitation.. when he does it it's generally brilliant. (but involves a lot of energy!) thanks for the great quote from him!
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